As designers it’s often hard to for us to articulate the power of great design to new clients. It’s exciting when the impact of design is recognized and called out by users, as we saw in a recent assessment of Duke University’s Link, the Duke Teaching and Learning Center that opened in the lower level of Perkins Library in August 2008. Designed to encourage collaborative work and project-based learning, the Link answers a bigger question: how do we learn and how can our environments best support this? The Link is the culmination of our extensive planning and partnership with Duke, including the creation and refinement of several prototype spaces. The assessment, which was completed this spring notes how “faculty and students tended to single out architectural and design characteristics as the best features of Link, including the colors, lighting (including natural light), glass walls and comfortable furnishings.”
Dan Vlahos
